Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

KURDISH GENOCIDE IN NORTHERN IRAQ
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Los Angeles (UCLA), was the author of two early and influential works on genocide:
Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1981) and The Prevention of Genocide (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).
Kurdish Genocide in Northern Iraq. The Kurdish population of Iraq in the mid-1980s
numbered some 4 million, or about 22 percent of the overall Iraqi people. For much of the
rule of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein (1937–2006), the Kurds, a non-Arab Muslim people,
were discriminated against and, at different times, subjected to policies of ethnic
cleansing and genocide. In March 1988, Iraqi aircraft bombed the Kurdish city of Halabja
with chemical weapons, the most dramatic (though not the only) instance of many uses
of such weapons in the first phase of the Iraqi campaign against the Kurds which had
begun the previous year. A series of offensives were launched against Kurdish guerrillas
fighting alongside Iranian troops as part of the wider Iran-Iraq conflict (1980–1988), and
entire villages were leveled. Men were separated from women and children, with the latter
concentrated in internment camps. It was later estimated that some one hundred
thousand men had been killed, and buried in mass graves far to the south; at least four
thousand Kurdish villages were destroyed, and with them much of the fabric of Kurdish
society in the areas targeted by the Iraqi military.
Kurdish Genocide in Northern Iraq, U.S. Response to. Well aware of the genocidal
(Al-Anfal) campaign (1986–1989) waged against the Kurds in northern Iraq by Iraqi
president Saddam Hussein (1937–2006), the U.S. government of President Ronald
Reagan (1911–2004) chose not to condemn Hussein’s policy for fear of alienating him
and placing the continued supply of Middle East oil in jeopardy. Concomitantly, during
the Iran-Iraq War between 1980 and 1988, Washington took the position that those fighting
the ayatollahs in Iran were to be supported, and this meant Saddam Hussein’s
Iraq—the same government that was persecuting, gassing, and slaughtering the Kurds
living in the north of the country. The Kurds’ situation was not helped by the fact that
they were themselves siding with Iran in its war with Iraq.
Proposals in the U.S. Congress for the imposition of economic sanctions against the
Iraqis were effectively killed off by the White House, supported behind closed doors by
influential lobby groups from big business interests. The most common response by the
United States to allegations of genocide by Iraq was for the United States to announce
that a fact-finding mission or investigative team was being put together to inquire into the
allegations. The United States’ policies were thus dictated by realpolitik concerns, not by
humanitarianism in the face of genocide and gross violations of human rights.
Kutner, Luis (1908–1993). A lawyer and author, Kutner was a cofounder of the noted
human rights organization Amnesty International (1961), and was a strong advocate of
World Habeas Corpus, an international tribunal established to resolve conflict between
nations. Among his most noted writings are World Habeas Corpus: A Proposal for an International
Court of Habeas Corpus and the United Nations Writ of Habeas Corpus (Chicago,
IL: World Freedom Press, 1958), and World Habeas Corpus (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana
Publications, 1962).